"Her little mother!" She had gazed at the crabbed characters till this word seemed to rise up off the page and enter into her very heart; immense tears gathered in her eyes, and fell in stars of bitterness upon the paper,—"For my own sick girlie, from her little mother."
In the evening she had said to Fritz in a low voice, almost imploring in its entreaty,—
"Couldst not thou, dear Fritz, find out for me who gave me this?"
"I have told thee already," replied Fritz, who was busy sharpening a wooden sword on the hard edge of the lowest window-sill. "It is the lamplighter; I am certain of it. Whenever he goes by with his ladder and lantern, I remark he is always looking up at this house and at thee; and, besides, his pockets are always bulged out as if he had heaps of things in them."
The reasoning was, no doubt, good; but it did not satisfy Violet.
"But has he any children, Fritz?" she asked softly and a little doubtfully, for Fritz sometimes grew impatient if his words were questioned.
"Of course he has—hundreds of them."
"But are any of them sick—sick, I mean, like me?" she pleaded anxiously.
"Sick like thee?" he repeated vaguely, for his mind was still engrossed entirely with sharpening the deadly blade which he held in his hand; which he did by moistening it in his mouth and rubbing it on the wood before him, so that the window-sill was now quite black with paint, and so were his lips—"Sick like thee? How can I tell? All I know is, he has only one child, and she is the greatest goose in all the town—that fat red-haired girl called Minna, who sits under the red umbrella on the steps of the chapel and sells fruit."